> Lasswitz's Martians differ little from man physically, but ethically, intellectually, scientifically, and socially they are the prototype of the ideal human being. They seek to educate man, asking in return only air and energy to supplement the diminished supplies in their own, older world.

The story revolves around a group of German scientists who, when seeking the North Pole, come upon a Martian settlement there..

A young German reader of "Two Planets", Wernher von Braun, would develop ballistic missiles for Germany/USA, rockets that launched the first US space satellite and the NASA launch vehicle that took Apollo to the Moon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_(scientists)

> Leo Szilard, who jokingly suggested that Hungary was a front for aliens from Mars, used this term. In an answer to the question of why there is no evidence of intelligent life beyond Earth (called the Fermi paradox) despite the high probability of it existing, Szilárd responded: "They are already here among us – they just call themselves Hungarians."

The group included Erdos and von Neumann.

Edit: This is an honest question, I'm not familiar with the extent of his crimes, if any. It certainly doesn't seem like a clear-cut "he was an objectively evil man but we looked the other way" based on the Wikipedia article. It could very well be his account, which from a brief skim seems reasonable, is accurate?

He was the Nazis' best rocket engineer, responsible for, among other things, the V2s that devastated much of London. By the standards of the Nuremberg trials, he probably should have been tried and convicted. But he was never even accused, because the US wanted his rocket expertise--by the time of the Nuremberg trials, he was already working for the US Army.

Absurd. For starters, by the standards of the nuremberg trials, there's no way in hell he would be convicted. For comparison, among the men actually acquitted by the nuremburg trials were Franz von Papen, Hitler's vice chancellor from 1933 to 1934 and the man who pressured Hindenburg to appoint Hitler to power, and Hans Fritzsche, a high ranking propagandist who was in the Fuhrerbunker in the last days of the war and after his acquittal took part in a cabal attempting to re-nazify West Germany.

The nuremberg trials targetted only the very highest level Nazis - only the top 5 highest ranking officers in the entire german military were indicted. Even if von Braun had been an enthusiastic Nazi (and there's quite a bit of evidence he wasn't), he was way too low level to have been tried nonetheless convicted by the Nuremberg trials.

The initial ones did, but there were subsequent ones targeting entire organizations--one of which was the SS, to which Von Braun belonged.

Those subsequent tribunals were still quite limited, with only about 1600 people being tried. For context, there were over a million members of the SS.

Further, the punishment for most of those convicted in these tribunals was forced labor, so had Von Braun been tried and convicted at that time, odds are he still would have most likely wound up working for the US developing their rockets. So the claim that the US shielded him doesn't really make sense.

Are you saying that supporting Hitler before the war should have been a war crime?

Looking at Wikipedia there seems to be something going on with Braun's involvement in forced labour and war prisoners. I don't see an outline of what the problem is; maybe there is something serious but if there is a problem Wikipedia doesn't seem to detail it. If building horrible weapons is a war crime then I think Fat Man and Little Boy probably take the cake.

Perhaps. But this doesn't change the fact that there were thousands or at least hundreds of others guilty of bigger crimes (at least directly) were never prosecuted. Only a tiny minority of war criminals were actually tried after WW2. And almost none of those who escaped justice (or received a slap on the wrist at most) were rocket scientists or were later hired by the US government.

The whole "denazification" process in Germany was very lenient and superficial relative to the severity of the crimes that were committed during and before the war. von Braun was very far down the ladder of responsibility...

> ad bellum and the indiscriminate nature of V-1 and V-2 rockets including their use against civilians was a violation of jus en bello.

Also on that.. how is this not the same as Order No. 154 (unrestricted submarine warfare). Dönitz was exonerated of war crimes because allies admitted that they were doing the same (IIRC Allied admirals even testified on his behalf). Certainly this would apply to the case of indiscriminate bombings? And von Braun wasn't even giving the order so by the standards of the day (or modern standards) I don't see who could he be legally tried for this.

The whole slave worker thing was another matter of course but almost nobody was prosecuted for stuff like that anyway..

Yeah they're terms of art. When US or British people use them they mean that aggression by English speakers is appropriate (really we should characterise any aggression as fundamentally defensive in nature) but aggression by people using barbarian tongues is inappropriate (if it damages the commercial interests of English speakers it might be better termed an affront against the divine nature of things). There are some complexities depending on trade agreements and current military alliances.

For example you can see strong defensive plays by the US in Afghanistan, Iraq or elsewhere in the middle east. But then you have examples of aggression by the USSR back in the day in the same countries which was largely unprovoked.

>Strong defensive plays by the US in Afghanistan, Iraq or elsewhere…

Do you know the difference between what you referenced above and the Nuremberg Trials from the standpoint of International Law?

Neither is being a chancellor. von Braun was much more than the super-selective characterization of "rocket scientist". His were the actions of a war criminal to anyone except his supporters and the people who benefited greatly from him not being considered as such.

Eye witness testimonies say that von Braun personally picked slave laborers from concentration camps to work and eventually be tortured and killed in the factories he personally supervised. These facts are undisputed by any historical account. The only reason he got away with these crimes is that he was useful to the US space program.

Saying "but being a rocket scientist during a war isn't a war crime" sounds willfully ignorant or just apologetic and that's not the kind of thing you want to excuse. Nobody's blaming him for being a brilliant rocket scientist, only for willingly killing thousands of unwilling prisoners in just a few short years.

If you want an analogy that doesn't involve a history book, imagine hearing that Amazon's or Tesla's CEOs pretended they had no idea that thousands of warehouse or factory workers they had hand picked from prisons were killed or raped every year at work according to rules and procedures signed off by those very same CEOs who routinely patrol the floors to see those rules are enforced. Would you still be here saying "but being a CEO isn't a crime"?

That's not really true though. Most nazis who were committing crimes on the same level (or even more serious ones) got away with them.

Also, fyi the Nuremberg trials were not restricted to war crimes, with many defendants being convicted of crimes against peace or crimes against humanity for their propagation of the Nazi regime and leadership roles in atrocities like the Holocaust. Many of the defendants who were convicted were businessmen, propogandists, and members of the civilian government.

The US bombed German civilians and Japanese civilians in mass numbers.

I still don't see what that has to do with the original comment that mentioned him. If we're talking about him in depth, absolutely mention it and dig into it. I guess the thing I'm having trouble reconciling in my head is the need to, upon a passing reference to someone orthogonal to the main point, say it's "worth including" that they're a controversial figure. The controversy seems irrelevant to me. It seems to border on virtue signaling, this need to say "oh by the way, Nazis are bad" when that (objective fact) has nothing to do with anything.

I see your other comment and I get the point you're trying to make but I don't think it has anything to do with speaking respectfully or with any sort of courtesy about a Nazi, just about trying to make a point.

I wasn't familiar with von Braun before reading this thread, and I appreciate the extra info. Complex figure. Maybe even a really bad guy. But, also interesting that his work was useful in getting us to the moon.

Maybe we can all appreciate that dichotomy.

Even more interesting to note, is without your initial pushback, I wouldn't have read more detail about him, so I owe your resistance to actually exploring this facet of the man's alleged history to getting me to actually read a bit about it.

Yes, agreed. I'm not arguing that the standards of Nuremberg were actually the right ones.

As for Allied war crimes, many of those were only criminalized after-the-fact. For example, the justification for nuking Nagasaki was "well, there's a factory nearby, so that's a valid military target".

[0] For example, "fiduciary duty to shareholders" was a valid excuse that saved several businessmen at Nuremburg, despite them running forced labor camps that were deadlier than Auschwicz.

The H&N bombings followed close on the heels of bombing 72 other cities (including Tokyo) as part of an ongoing HE + incendiary campaign with list of targets.

These specific targets were selected for atomic tested as they had not been bombed before and served as "clean" test beds for the before and after comparisons, in addition to having some containing topography.

What's important to remember is that they were selected from a long list of targets that were all scheduled to be bombed, the fact that they were low priority from a military standpoint is what had "saved" then from not already having been bombed.

When Hiroshima was bombed the only prior atomic test at Trinity was on a tower with a lot of external controls .. it wasn't even certain at the time that this would work as a bomb let alone "end the war".

The military compulsion to battlefield test a weapon that had consumed more R&D budget than any ever before in history was intense, and the WW's were rapidly closing out with Germany defeated and Russia closing in on Japan.

After the bombings, immediately after, came a lot of retro fitting justifiction, more so with the Cold War .. but it was never as clear cut and about swift endings and saving casualities as came to be believed.

People forget that atomic bomb or not the US was already committed to levelling all cities within Japan.

For more, and a deeper dive in the many takes on dropping the bomb, see:

https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/03/08/the-decision-to-u...

for example (it has many references to many historic viewpoints)

It seems, unsurprisingly, that the military didn't really see the atomic bombs as anything other than a really big bomb - it was only later that they came to be seen as something qualitatively different, and "a bomb so big it is war-ending" is really only something you can know in hindsight.

That, arguably, came with advances in delivery methods. A-bombs alone don't end wars. Multiple sides each putting them on advanced bombers and intercontinental missiles, made to hit quickly and be effectively impossible to stop - that's when nuclear weapons graduate from being just bigger bombs to being existential threats and/or tools for keeping world peace.

That was probably one reason, but by no means the only one, nor even IMO a very significant one (and the article you link to, which is a good one from a good historian whose entire nuclear secrecy blog is worth reading, does not make the claim you are making--it gives a number of justifications that were made at the time, and the one you give is not one of them).

The Gar Alperovitz book referenced in the article is also worth reading, as is another historical study, Racing the Enemy [1] by Hasegawa. The latter book is not solely about the decision to use the bomb, but more generally about the process by which the war with Japan ended, but that decision and the process that produced it of course play a large role.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Racing-Enemy-Stalin-Truman-Surrender/...

> it wasn't even certain at the time that this would work as a bomb

AFAIK there was no doubt that the implosion method used in the Nagasaki bomb would work after the Trinity test. And there was never any doubt that the gun-type method used in the Hiroshima bomb would work--they didn't even bother to test it before the Hiroshima bombing. The only question was what the practical yield would be under bombing conditions. But that could have been assessed by bombing tests on uninhabited locations, as was done after the war.

> it was never as clear cut and about swift endings and saving casualities as came to be believed.

People forget that atomic bomb or not the US was already committed to levelling all cities within Japan.

These things are quite true. They do not, however, mean that wanting to field test two different bomb designs was a significant factor. Based on my reading I don't actually think it was one at the political level (what the military people thought was another matter, but the key decisions were made at the political level). Politically, I think the biggest factors involved were uncertainty about what it would actually take to get Japan to surrender, and the desire (at least once Truman came into office) to keep the Soviet Union from playing any part in postwar Japan, and more generally to deter them from expanding further.

Circling back to at the time, there are copious notes on materials, orders, deployments, and boxes of documentation, and then there is relatively little on the underlying thought given to whether the two bombs should even be used at all. At the time. No shortage of after the fact recollections of course.

While I'm not a historian, more an applied geophysics dabbler, I'm familiar with the material, I've met and talked with Alex Wellerstein, I once interviewed Mark Oliphant, and I've spoken with a number of the technical people who came out for the Emu Fields and Montebello tests.

In the context of an ongoing bombing campaign and truly vast amounts money and resources spent on creating new weapons it's difficult to imagine a scenario in which the bombs would not have been field tested. If that kind of take is a foundation then everthing written becomes bookkeeping and for the record.

In life, where there's momentum politics will often follow rather than lead.

Regardless, I simply have an opinion (well, many and not all consistent with each other) and not a book or a career; I principally enjoy jolting people who have a particular fixed view of many events in history to become aware of wider fields of opinion and to consider how consensus views evolve over time.

The V2 killed more (enslaved) people who were building it than it did in its attacks. It was only 'successful' as a propaganda weapon.

...And by the standards of the Nuremberg trials, the heads of every allied airforce, and all of their immediate subordinates and sub-subordinates should have been dancing the hemp fandango.

I'll also point out that a lot of Nazi military officers and civilian leaders and industrialists, despite significant involvement in the regime's crimes were not found guilty[1] in those trials.

---

[1] Even in the Soviet-ran ones - and as every loyal comrade knows, the courts of the glorious Soviet Union are the fairest, most humane, and most merciful justice system the world has ever conceived, especially when it came to the question of judging fascists.

- "... also the German scientists led by Prof. Wernher von Braun were aware of everything daily. As they went along the corridors, they saw the exhaustion of the inmates, their arduous work and their pain. Not one single time did Prof. Wernher von Braun protest against this cruelty during his frequent stays at Dora. Even the aspect of corpses did not touch him: On a small area near the ambulance shed, inmates tortured to death by slave labor and the terror of the overseers were piling up daily. But, Prof. Wernher von Braun passed them so close that he was almost touching the corpses.[63]"

I agree with your comment. Let's never speak in respectful language about a Nazi SS officer. It's a loud silence when someone circles around the topic without mentioning it, as if there were some obligation of diplomacy—as if you owe tactfulness or professional courtesy to Nazis.

It's a unique feature of American/Western historiography that would incline you to believe this. I find it interesting we don't have to tack on similar disclaimers when it comes to any other similarly horrible group throughout history; the brutality of the Caesars, the Chinese emperors, the Comanche -- forget about it: we can speak of them dispassionately, as non-temporal observers. But mere broaching of the subject of the Nazis requires confession that, let's repeat it in unison, they were evil.

Well, we can also speak of Wernher von Braun or even contemporary figures that way. It's only more likely that someone comes along and points out that we shouldn't forget about the context.

When we speak of ancient history, the context is already forgotten beyond what has been documented. There are no living witnesses nor people who directly related to them. (Of course, archaeological and historical research can find more evidence.)

However we do speak of them passionately anyway, even if the discussion is less emotional. You bringing up the examples that you brought up is a perfect example. People immediately understand what you mean. Anyone who agrees with you will have to feel passionately about these long past events.

We all know about the cruelties that came with the Ceasars etc. because people documented them and didn't let it go. We don't need to point it out because it is common knowledge. Do go to a history conference and claim that Julius Caesar was a totally fine and nice guy and you'll see that people can get passionate very quickly.

Discussions get stirred up more quickly for contemporary figures whose power to let information disappear or fade away can sometimes extend beyond their own deaths - for as long as there are people alive who may be affected by the image created.

I would say an unemotional actor will recognize that those examples are objectively analogical. But that's not really here or there because I'm not saying one cannot have a well-founded moral reaction to the past. I'm saying it's an accident of our location in history that only Nazis receive this treatment -- well-deserved as it may be -- and admittedly one should expect any group to harbor resentment towards a vanquished enemy for some time. But this forum and particularly the context of this thread requires some stationary, objective analysis, which is impossible with the ankle-biting "by the ways."

There's the thing about temporal closeness and impact on actual politics and ideology. Nazism and Fascism's brands of ultra rightwing ideology still looms large in part of the world.

And there are still people alive who lived through some of the horrors the Nazis inflicted upon the world. None lives today who saw Caesar's dictatorship. Nobody, to my mind, seriously worships Imperial China or wants a return of the Caesars. There are no Comanche atrocities apologists (of note).

But Nazism and its modern day offshoots are still worshipped by enough people that every mention of people related to Nazism must be peppered with these disclaimers. It's important to note Von Braun was an unapologetic nazi and that he should not be celebrated as a person.

Not as distinct from basic impulses we can detect in all periods. These terms we use (rightwing, fascist) are new terms for ancient political dispositions. If I describe someone as imperialist, patriarchal, sexist, antisemitic, and racist, am I more likely to be talking about the Nazis, the Romans, the Egyptians, the Abbasids or the Puritans?

> Nazism and its modern day offshoots are still worshipped by enough people that every mention of people related to Nazism must be peppered with these disclaimers

My understanding of human psychology does not incline me to think this is a remotely successful strategy.

I disagree. Nazism and Fascism are largely influential today but Caesar isn't.

> My understanding of human psychology does not incline me to think this is a remotely successful strategy.

I cannot vouch for your understanding. I do know Nazism and Fascism must be loudly denounced whenever found. They must not be allowed to fester in the darkness.

Sorry, but this is when I just have to tune out. It's like when people say, "America has no culture," or something similar.

> It's like when people say, "America has no culture," or something similar.

I do not live in the US so I couldn't care less about what people say there.

It's also funny to brand Caesar as an evil dictator. He was a revolutionary with very benevolent tendencies, both toward the masses and to his enemies. Dictatorships like Sulla's, which came before, were the brutal ones. What the people back then saw Caesar as was as a populist hero fixing a crumbling, broken, and corrupt system. Later, the people of the Empire would think back of the Republican era as one of horror and chaos -- because that's what you get with mob rule.

It's all very relativist.

I think, in the far future, people will regard the Nazis as a point on a continuum and all current governments today as not that far away on that continuum -- not like we do, thinking Hitler was the devil.

Also, both Caesar and Hitler were products of their environment. Normal people responding a certain way to their circumstances. Maybe it's more productive to regard that environment as "evil" than raising people up to Anti-Christ status when the environment churns them out. In Caesar's case, that was a broken senatorial system and a provincial military system not designed to deal with how large and ambitious Rome started getting; in Hitler's, it was how brutally the European powers treated Germany after WW1 and the nearby rise of communism.

We're not there yet, not when this is still relatively recent history and when we haven't yet dealt with Nazism's offspring.

> Also, both Caesar and Hitler were products of their environment. Normal people responding a certain way to their circumstances.

I don't know about Caesar, but I certainly don't buy this argument for Hitler. The minute he supported the Final Solution or decided to get rid of 80% of Eastern Europe, he crossed the line. There were people at the time of Hitler, even in Germany, who were horrified by Nazism -- not as in "I don't agree with this", but "I cannot believe this is happening". Some were executed for objecting to it. I'm sure more were silently horrified, not brave or reckless enough to openly reject it, but in private repulsed by it. There were people who hid or helped Jews (and I'm not arguing here Jews were the only victims of Nazism, mind you!).

Hitler was a product of his time and upbringing, but he was also an evil man. There are no excuses for the Holocaust or Generalplan Ost or the many evils of Nazism, when we know people from that time were horrified by it. Evil may be banal, as Arendt put it, but it's still evil.

Do Germans also have jokes like "how many Hungarians does it take to screw in a light bulb"?

To be clear, Mars’ descent into inhospitality was totally natural and the result of a smaller planet with stripped atmosphere just outside the habitable zone as the Sun cooled. I doubt Martian life developed to be multicellular. But I bet when we go we’ll find fossils of algae colonies and cyanobacteria, and maybe even some living remnants underground.

Sun becomes hotter with time passed, not cooler.

> Early panspermia from Mars settles a LOT of astrobiological questions about origin of life and LUCA complexity.

Does it solves questons or just moves them to another planet?

One of the outstanding problems in astrobiology I mention is that the Earth was inhospitable until 3.8Gya, and the oldest fossils of presumably DNA based life (since it matches existing life we can study) was 3.7Gya. Mars was hospitable ~4.5Gya. So either life emerged IMMEDIATELY on Earth and did a complexity speed run before slowing down and remaining stagnant for the next billion years or so, or it emerged on Mars first and Earth was seeded once it was cool enough.

There is much uncertainty about this. The early Earth was a volatile place with a lot of raw materials and energy available, and a lot of chemistry happening. I wouldn't rule out that some part of Earth may have had the right conditions for life right from the beginning. Certainly if we expect life to be able to survive a ride on a piece of ejecta from Mars, it's plausible to imagine it surviving in some boundary niche amidst the heat and fury of the Hadean Earth.

Even if it was, it wouldn't have survived the impact that created the Moon.

Its also why we better be damn sure the mars sample return is absolutely sterile lest we contaminate our planet with extraterrestrial microbes.

At the very least, I would expect something akin to chalk left behind by proto-diatoms that had calcium carbonate skeletons.

[1] - https://attheu.utah.edu/facultystaff/qa-perseverance-rovers-...

The Great Pyramid of Giza is a massive and extremely hardy structure that will outlast all modern buildings. Yet it's substantially deteriorating after less than 5,000 years, and it will eventually just completely disintegrate, absent the already ongoing preservation/restoration efforts. It might take 20,000 years, maybe a million. A quick search on the internet suggests nobody really knows, other than that it will happen. And now we're talking about time frames of billions of years. So what would a sterilized, perpetually radiated, atmosphere free Earth over billions of years look like, paired with never-ending massive dust storms (as on Mars)? Well, probably not especially unlike Mars does today. But oh what treasures would await you far below the surface!

I don't necessarily think anything does await us, but who knows? It's a tantalizing possibility that we won't be able to dismiss until we have humans on Mars. It's vaguely analogous to the early observations of 'canals' on Mars [1] whose explanation ranged from running water to active geoengineering from another advanced species on the planet. Their exact meaning was debated all the way into the mid 20th century, until we finally were able to get probes that could take 'high res' photos of the surface that showed they were definitely just optical illusions. A disappointing discovery, but nonetheless emphasizing that the importance of actually testing things instead of just relying on indirect instrumentation/data of this era or that.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_canals

Things kids can think up, that we can most certainly do that would put us insanely ahead but ... we just don't?

Like, why do we visit the moon but not have people stay there at all? Why are there no structures there?

Why do we ignore the Earth's mysteries a lot and go directly to Mars?

277 total Martian meteorites — with the largest weighing 14.5 kg — is not hundreds of tons yearly.

Most of it gets destroyed on entry, right? No organic matter surviving?

The underlying reason is that momentum scales with volume but air resistance scales with surface area.

Tons of meteorites in general, sure — but not from Mars.

(48.5 * 365) * (277 / 72,000) = 68 tons per year as an extremely speculative estimate here, ignoring entirely probable variances in what hits us (much of which is sand-grain sized) versus what we identify... and again, any estimate here we have to multiply by a few billion years.

And it wouldn't be technologically hard to do it such that no trace remains over those timescales.

So, yes, that's "crazy". On the other hand, it's unfalsifiable in the absence of other theories.

Besides, deciding what was inhospitable for early life is an exercise of noisy assumptions. I'd bet the error margin is larger than that difference.

I think it was maybe from this source? https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B97801...

But they don't have nearly as many opportunities to react as in a hot planet with an atmosphere. So pushing that life started there instead of only recognizing it's a very unlikely (but still possible) possibility isn't sustained by evidence.

For the appearance of life, a planet with a hot interior and volcanism is necessary, so that minerals that are stable only at high temperatures in the interior are ejected to the surface, where after cooling down they are no longer in chemical equilibrium, providing the energy necessary to drive the synthesis of organic macromolecules (by producing through chemical reactions with water reduced compounds like dihydrogen and carbon monoxide, which can reduce the abundant carbon dioxide and dinitrogen to eventually generate amino-acids).

The solar energy cannot play any role in the appearance of life, because harvesting it requires systems that are much more complex than those that appear naturally in the inorganic minerals and fluids.

While the Earth had certainly all the preconditions for the appearance of life right here, it is likely that Mars also had them in the beginning.

What another poster has said is plausible, i.e. the only reason for supposing that life could have been brought on Earth from another place is that life has appeared rather quickly on Earth, even if this is an event with a much lower probability than all the other events that have occurred after that during the evolution towards more complex forms of life, which have required billions of years to happen.

If life has been transferred to Earth from elsewhere, Mars is the only plausible source, because it had the conditions necessary to generate life long enough before Earth and because fragments from Mars have been frequently transported to Earth, where they fall as meteorites, after being ejected from Mars by impacts that happened there, which is easier than from other planets due to the lower gravity.

Despite the fact that it is not impossible, I doubt that life has been brought from Mars, but it is indeed puzzling that life seems to have appeared very quickly on Earth.

There are also facts that are hard to explain by the hypothesis of transfer from Mars. If that happened, than the forms of life that have been transferred must have consisted of at least one kind of autotrophic "bacteria" and at least several distinct kinds of viruses, to explain all the existing living beings as their descendants.

There is considerable evidence for the fact that the current genetic code of the nucleic acids is the product of a long evolution process. In the beginning there must have been a simpler code where many more combinations were equivalent and which encoded no more than 10 amino-acids, perhaps only 6 or even only 4 in its original variant. So very ancient "bacteria" may have superficially looked like modern bacteria but they must have had a quite different metabolism. In the hypothesis where life has moved between planets, there would be an open problem of when had the transfer happened during this early evolution of the genetic system.

On Earth there has remained no survivor with a much simpler genetic code (though there are a few examples of only slightly simpler genetic codes than the canonic variant). Perhaps the earlier living beings were completely uncompetitive with the modern ones, so they have been eaten or they have starved to death. In the case of a transfer from Mars, it would also exist the possibility that only living beings with a complex genetic code had survived through a transfer and the others had remained on Mars.

The only thing panspermia can tell us is that it's ok if we can't find evidence for the genesis of life on Earth.

However, haven't we roughly recreated the process in a lab in the last couple of decades?

And we may never have the answer because we simply can't know because no one was there because nothing was there. But there's a plausible enough explanation that we don't need to invoke the extraterrestrial and all of its problems.

And I think that's part of the appeal of panspermia, it makes life extraterrestrial. And if it is extraterrestrial in origin, then it could have happened elsewhere. Whereas if the genesis of life is contained to Earth, then the chances go down that it happened somewhere else.

Is that enough energy to boil the living things that might be in the rock?

Mars was somewhat warmer before, but that was not because of geothermal, but because it used to have a thicker atmosphere, and that retained heat better.

OK I know it sounds crazy...but it's fun to link legends with science.

I, for one, am not planning to leave earth anytime soon, thanks.

Meanwhile, those stories about martians are all metaphors. But people can't distinguish the symbol from the symbolized.

You argue from the position that Martians 'must not be real'.

Why is your conclusion any better than those who argue that Martians could be real?

Science works upon evidence. If so:

a) there is some evidence to support the existence of prior life on Mars;

b) it is not the scientific case that life on Mars is impossible/implausible

So why do you so strongly hold on to your own dogma, and chastise the conclusions of others as mere 'fantasy' and 'sci-fi'? You are no smarter than everyone else, by merely being contrarian.

I cite how science permits plausibility upon evidence. This is in contrast to OP's wishful dogma, where anything not presently known must be fantasy/sci-based and implausible - which is not how science works.

Then again, I get it. If somebody offered to build me a Gundam I wouldn't think "Oh no, a symbol for the dehumanization of soldiers on the modern battlefield" I'd think "Is the beam saber included?"

The weather radar app replicates a feature of the Star Trek tricorder that I saw in an episode of TNG.

Household robots like in The Jetsons are coming soon, a couple decades at most from today.

Etc…

Wow, you're doing some heavy caveating with that comment.

Sure, someone today can say that a handheld device to show you the weather in any part of the world seems like a "duh" thing now, but in the 60s when Star Trek came to TV with a tricoder or really a handheld anything was pushing credibility. Computers at the time took up rooms in buildings. Of course zillenials never knowing the world before handheld mobile devices can't imagine a time when it took imagination to think of the things they have today.

And how did people come up with things before the sci fi was available like it is now.

I just really think influence of sci fi is really overestimated here.

In fact people bruteforcing ideas for sci fi before the tech was available proves that you can think of those ideas even if you don't have the tech available. And if you do, it is much easier to come up with all of it. The tech came naturally in order as different types of tech became available irrespective of sci fi.

What's your point?

No, I'm pretty sure a lot of people have came up with the ideas that I have, and irrespective of whether they watched sci-fi or not, as I did not.

I'm not even saying I'm smart or anything. I'm just saying people are capable of coming up with ideas without having anything to do with sci fi.

Life effectively began on Earth around 400 million years after it formed, and that's about the time that Mars' core cooled off and atmosphere got blown away. It seems that there was just enough time for life to start on Mars before it got snuffed out by the planetary geology of Mars and loss of its magnetosphere. If we ever find life on Mars, it's most certainly likely to be single-celled organisms.

Maybe given even 1,000,000 of observable universes the odds were just 1 out of 1,000,000.

How can people confidently claim that there must be some other civilizations, we wouldn't know the odds in the first place unless we know the exact mechanisms involved.

To me it seems like the probability could have been anything. It could have required any amount of certain chemical reactions to happen in certain order where the probability can vary wildly depending on the amount and likelihood of those reactions. E.g. it could be 0.01 to the power of 1,000,000 or as well as to the power of 10e64 and so on.

The point is that we do know some things about the universe and, given what we do know, we think the probability is high. So we're obviously missing something but we don't know what.

The thing that makes the Fermi Paradox so interesting is that every resolution is either interesting or implies something interesting.

Isnt the answer dead simple though? Space is mostly empty. Everything is very far away and getting even further as the universe expands. If there were bits of life scattered around the universe I wouldnt expect contact between them.

The paradox seems to rely on the assumption that if aliens existed they would have colonized the entire universe by now but that seems like a huge leap when we look at ourselves.

Universe is almost 14B years old. Life on earth is almost 4b years old. There have been several mass extinction events which almost completely whiped out life. There are planets in our system that may have had life but would have died off a very long time ago. Its kind of remarkable that we are here and how much progress we’ve made. We are certainly fitter than average (survivorship bias proves that). Yet we are nowhere even remotely close of expanding out into the solar system and beyond. And how could we, if virtually all of that space is void of resources we need to survive? Why is it inevitable that some alien would have solved that?

When you think about it, an interstellar starship that must expend mass to change velocity is going to have to make a severe tradeoff between mass and travel time. In practical terms you have to first build a colony that can sustain itself indefinitely in your own solar system before you build one that can also accelerate/decelerate to a million kph and doesn't have the advantage of being near a free source of energy or any sources of new materials.

How do we know that the probability isn't something like 0.01 to the power of some very large number, far higher than amount of total planets etc?

If we don't know the exact mechanism for all we know the odds could be infinitely low, even so low that even after billions of big bangs only 1 would have had life occurring anywhere at all and lower than that. Because maybe the first life form literally had to appear spontaneously from bruteforce chemical reactions with such low odds of ocurring.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter

Now is this a positive detection of life? No because other possible factors can not be ruled out. But what puzzles me is why we have never followed up with any further experiments to try and detect life? After the Viking missions we never conducted any further experiments that could rule out any other possible chemical reactions to get closer to confirming the presence of microbial life.

So I would say with the Labeled Release experiments coupled with the seasonal Methane detections strongly imply that there is still microbial extremophiles on Mars.

> "With unsterilized Terrestrial samples, though, the addition of more nutrients after the initial incubation would then produce still more radioactive gas as the dormant bacteria sprang into action to consume the new dose of food. This was not true of the Martian soil; on Mars, the second and third nutrient injections did not produce any further release of labeled gas."

> "Albet Yen of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has shown that, under extremely cold and dry conditions and in a carbon dioxide atmosphere, ultraviolet light (remember: Mars lacks an ozone layer, so the surface is bathed in ultraviolet) can cause carbon dioxide to react with soils to produce various oxidizers, including highly reactive superoxides (salts containing O2−). When mixed with small organic molecules, superoxidizers readily oxidize them to carbon dioxide, which may account for the LR result. Superoxide chemistry can also account for the puzzling results seen when more nutrients were added to the soil in the LR experiment; because life multiplies, the amount of gas should have increased when a second or third batch of nutrients was added, but if the effect was due to a chemical being consumed in the first reaction, no new gas would be expected. Lastly, many superoxides are relatively unstable and are destroyed at elevated temperatures, also accounting for the "sterilization" seen in the LR experiment."

But that's probably because martian microbes are less tolerant of high temperatures when compared to Earth microbes. But, yes I am aware there are other non life factors that could have resulted in a positive detection. But my point is why would we never follow up with further experiments to test for possible chemical reactions?

According to Wikipedia, the radiation levels are too high:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_on_Mars#Cosmic_radiation

> Even the hardiest cells known could not possibly survive the cosmic radiation near the surface of Mars since Mars lost its protective magnetosphere and atmosphere.[63][64] After mapping cosmic radiation levels at various depths on Mars, researchers have concluded that over time, any life within the first several meters of the planet's surface would be killed by lethal doses of cosmic radiation.[63][65][66] The team calculated that the cumulative damage to DNA and RNA by cosmic radiation would limit retrieving viable dormant cells on Mars to depths greater than 7.5 meters below the planet's surface.[65] Even the most radiation-tolerant terrestrial bacteria would survive in dormant spore state only 18,000 years at the surface; at 2 meters—the greatest depth at which the ExoMars rover will be capable of reaching—survival time would be 90,000 to half a million years, depending on the type of rock.[67]

Nope. More probable for it to get quarantined, for fear of cross contamination. IIRC NASA purposefully doesn't land craft on the locations with conditions closer to habitability in Mars today, fearing stowaway microbes from our probes run amok and eradicate any extant martian biota, just like rabbits and other critters brought by Europeans wrecked ecosystems in Australia.

I don't think they'd quarantine the planet due to it, even moreso because even if the US decides to quarantine it, other nations might not and even then, there'd be value to sending a crew to say, a station in Mars orbit or on Phobos/Deimos, for more effective control over survey vehicles and to reduce the feedback loop between retrieving samples from the surface and studying them.

   - Chemically inert
   - Recognizably artificial w/o context
   - Physically hardy
   - Planet-scale mass-produced

Easy peasy. :)

https://nowiknow.com/mathletes/

We just don't enough machines exploring Mars to do it right now.